I found the following comments by Om Malik and Mike Arrington to be quite telling.

In his blog post entitled The Myth, Reality & Future of Web 2.0 Om Malik writes

The Myth of Web 2.0 is the investment opportunities. The reality of Web 2.0 is too little original thinking. Web 2.0, simply put, is a set of technologies and a new kind of thinking, which companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and AOL are incorporating in their products. That’s the reality and the future of Web 2.0.

In the blog post entitled AOL To Release YouTube Clone Mike Arrington writes

Prepare for the launch of AOL UnCut (currently in open beta), a near perfect clone of YouTube...This is right on the heels of the launch of AIM Pages, which is directly targeting Myspace and other social networks...I am seeing an increasing trend of the big guys simply copying what successful startups are doing. AOL with this product and AIM Spaces. Google with Google Notepad and a flurry of other projects, etc. The only large company that is even experimenting with unproven concepts at this point is Microsoft with its various Live.com ideas. I’d like to see more experimenting at the big company level.

I guess the criticism has now grown from 'building a new Windows app is just doing research for Microsoft' to 'building a new Web application is just doing research for Google/Yahoo/AOL/Microsoft'. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

On the positive side, it is good to see Microsoft being called innovative in comparison to Google by a technology pundit.